So What If They Make $100,000?

Indeed.

Too much arrogance afoot in the world.

Suppose I suspend my disbelief for a moment and imagine that there is really a significant percentage of wait-staff who manage to earn $100K in a year (a claim that is itself fucking ridiculous). But suppose an enterprising waiter or waitress managed to pull $100K. Isn't that supposed to be the American dream? Working hard to do well?

These people don't really believe in that. They believe in some kind of economic caste system. Fuck them.

eom

I'm curious to know how many of their ancestors fought on the losing side in the Revolutionary War. Not that I believe political attitudes are genetically determined or anything like that, but it'd be interesting to see how many of those fighting for a British-style class system now are descended from those who fought the same fight in 1776.

That was never so obvious to me as the day I watched a pair of asshats with their pretty blue CPAC lanyards harassing a Street Sense vendor, yelling "Get a job!" at the fellow. Not only is it proof that conservatives are only paying lip service to their "ideals", it was damning proof that these two were idiots. The guy's got a job, he stands outside that Metro station selling his newspapers in rain, 100-degree heat and the unpleasant morning crush of Dupont Circle foot traffic. These two clearly never did an honest day's work in their lives by comparison.

Street Sense vendors and writers are the epitome of the very values that conservatives blather on about without meaning...they're literally pulling themselves up out of the gutter with hard work and entrepreneurial drive.

Even animals have an instinct for self-preservation. Amazing how breathtakingly stupid people can be.

Recommended.

"I don't get two weeks' paid vacation!" "Those lazy so-and-sos only work 40 hours a week!" And so on and so forth. The question doesn't get asked, "Why don't you have a job that pays a living wage, has defined benefits, and provides a process for resolving disputes that don't end with 'take it or leave it, you ingrate'?" Because the answer is just too uncomfortable for the folks who own the media outlets and their major sponsors.

super stars who are working at two different locations and are able to take advantage of some unusual combination of events.

instead doing the job you where told to do you instead take your focus on something not pertaining to your
job duties.

That should be level for insubordination if you asked me.

Wondering Eyez.

During inventory time at the auto parts warehouse I used to work at, everyone was required to be out on the floor. Even the senior guys made no more than $18 an hour and did work that made much of their upper body and arms awash in pain. I couldn't even imagine working in tool and die shops with air hammers and tons of noise. My dad had to LIVE in a steel mill for 37 years just to provide for all of us. He now has severe back pain and a defibrilator. He's lucky he retired.

Worker-blame for corporate screw-ups is the tool of the laissez-FAIL set. Unions gave EVERY worker almost all the rights they know and take for granted.

It amazes me that people think $50,000/year is a king's ransom. Do they not get that's what the average American SHOULD be earning if wages kept up with productivity and inflation these past three decades?

It amazes me that people think $50,000/year is a king's ransom. Do they not get that's what the average American SHOULD be earning if wages kept up with productivity and inflation these past three decades?

Amen.

local underground unionized coal miners were receiving the same shit for making $50 a day! That would have been in the 1970s.

You hit the nail on the head with your post.

Some idiot on another forum told me that unions are killing the economy.

journeyman. The most I can make for a non-overtime annual income is about 43,000. That's despite the fact that my trade can be very technical. I've built computer chip manufacture labs for Texas Instruments. Think that doesn't require some skills? There's chemicals and vapors in there that will eat the marrow out of your bones and otherwise kill you in some very nasty ways. And that's just one example of what I've done in my trade. I made $100,000 for TWO YEARS work as foreman in charge of the outlined area (stainless steel roof) in this photo of an airport terminal:



So, considering my years of honed skills (and all the dangers I encountered along the way), I'm still only worth $50,000 a year, and that's with overtime - time taken away from my family and life. And yet I'm a vilified by the rightwingers and union-busters for wanting just a little better quality of life. I'm sure most of those thousands passing under my airport roof on a daily basis make my income look like peanuts. Most of them will never know how close I came to being crushed by a crane that fell on that building while it was being built.

this is, your labor is actually worth something tangible. Your labor was fundamental to produce and build real, physical, useful assets.

The irony of it all, is that those with little in terms of value added are the ones making the really big bucks, for not that much labor (or labor whose skills are fundamental for a society, seriously how much money do financiers make for what amounts to basically moving assets electronically from one account to another. In fact many of these positions could be easily replaced with computerized systems which are much better at doing real-time fitting and optimization strategies. Yet these same people, with little in terms of value added, tend to be the same ones with utter contempt for those who actually earn their money for a living: labor.

but the doctor has alot more in loans to pay off.

In college & grad school I had plenty of friends who not only didn't have loans, but their parents paid their rent and gave them an allowance as well.

But even if you do have the loans, there are ways to lower the payments (graduated repayment)and even take forebearances if you have other expenses come up. If your take home is about $10,000 a month (if you're making say $200K - not unusual for a lawyer or doctor), you can make your $1,000 payment per month with plenty left over. Plus there is the potential to make a lot more than that if you make it to a partner situation down the road.

That versus $8/hr at McDonalds forever, maybe a bit more if you become a manager.

We took our chances with the loans in my immediate family, while my mom actually works at McDonalds part-time to supplement her social security (she has a high school diploma, but encouraged all of us kids to go to college). I can tell you flat out that even with loans we have alot more disposable income, and we are the ones who help my mom when she needs money for prescriptions etc...

So to take this back to the theoretical level, I wouldn't be feeling sorry for those poor doctors with their loans, I think they're going to be ok. I'll save my sympathies (and solidarity) for the McDonalds workers any day.

Too many people simply assume that if you are working in a job that requires little to no skills or education, you should be doomed to serfdom. The rest of the civilized world has figured out that hard work, regardless of type, should entitle a person to a decent basic standard of living at the minimum. The concept is called solidarity. Other places have it. The US doesn't.

Medical school would be a lot cheaper if we had more slots, but the AMA would have a fit over the prospect of more doctors out there competing for patients.

Blue collar workers are 'less than'. If your job does not require a college degree and you come home dirty at night, you deserve to fight for minimum wage and live in substandard housing with no comfort or luxuries. A 'labor' job is punishment for your failure at life. It is to be endured just long enough to 'straighten up and fly right' by going to college and looking just like the "I'm a Mac" guy.

Illegal immigration is great because 'it doesn't hurt anybody' - except blue collar workers. We are told that it doesn't affect wages or the availability of jobs.

H1-B's, however, are terrible because they drive wages down and affect job availability.

So, you're a 'racist' if you work for a living and resent one group of brown people affecting your (blue collar) wages, and a good and decent citizen if you are opposed to a DIFFERENT set of brown people affecting your (white collar) wages.

I've noticed this to be most prominent among the the 'teacher set' here, but cognitive dissonance is equal opportunity.

That workers, white or blue collar compete with each other for the same jobs, wages are suppressed partially as you've mentioned due to people who are in essence desperate or simply can afford to not make as much money as some Americans, with debt, families, or a higher expectation of living, real or imagined. Corporate greed, the decline of workers' rights and unions all play a part in suppressing wages and having us work for wages where we need two or more crappy jobs to make a living.

Simply being an immigrant, illegal or not, isn't the reason those people take lower wages and even if they were all magically gone the fact that unemployment ends, people get laid off for being too expensive, corporations are greedy, and people need to work to make a living will force people to take crappy paying jobs if that is all they can get because that is what is available. Americans have been taking crappy paying jobs for years, at best kicking all those 'immigrants' out will do is get wages up a little only to have them level out and continue to decline as they have been for years, if not decades. We need to reign in corporate greed, increase worker's rights and stop the disgusting games corporations play in efforts to deny workers benefits and keep us fighting each other for the privilege of having to work another crappy job.

benefits plans and pension plans to their annual salary, to make it look like they are earning even more.

Remember when they were blasting union autoworkers for that fictional $72-75K annual salary? It was really around $48K in actual gross salary, combined with about $24K annually in benefits like health, dental, retirement, and vacation.

Somehow though, they don't do the same for the white collar workers' annual bonuses, stock options, and benefits. Then a person making $120K annually would be at the $200K annual level if the same methods were applied.

Both my wife's employer and mine do that, and it's a pretty common component of salary negotiations. "Hey, look how much we're paying you really!" I don't even think it's crazy, since those things do cost money. One thing is, that benefit costs are comparatively flat. Cost of my benefits doesn't double, if my salary doubles.

But I agree, it's completely bogus to include it for one group of people and ignore it for another.

Wait till you turn forty nine or fifty - you might in some industries, find you no longer will receive a cost of living adjustment, because the employer has to suddenly dole out a lot more to be covering the worker who is older than the one that is younger.

In some cases that marker is fifty, and in other cases fifty five.

.....guaranteeing their BENEFITS & SALARY. Not just a difference, BIG FUCKING difference.

The amount of money paid is deceiving.

On one job I was paid about $40 per hour for about 500 hours worth of work over 3 months.

It came out to $20,000 for those 3 months. That's $80,000 annually if you extrapolate it to a year.

However, from that $20,000 I was wholly responsible for paying my own payroll/income taxes both federally and state-wise, SDI, SSI, Social Security, transportation, and health/dental insurance costs. The company that hired me didn't cover any of it.

That right there ate up slightly more than half the money when I ended up paying all that. It came out to an actual $9900 for 3 months of work in net income, or $3300 per month. Considering I worked about 166 hours per month for that 500 hours total, it boils down to $19.80 per hour.

is pretty good money in today's world, just so you aren't loosing track of reality..most people's hourly rate is before tax rate, they pay taxes too..

.........I am getting tired of "responding" to people that live in their own little world and it turning into a flurry of back & forth posts that accomplish nothing. I'm getting old and don't need the fucking aggravation.

What if people figure that out? That they are comparing wages to the sum of wages plus benefits.

Do you realize what kind of problems you can cause?

Next, they'll figure out that those "high" taxes in Europe are on that sum instead of the wages alone. Then they might figure out they pay more taxes here, and for less service for goodness sake.

Shhhhhh!

He was going on and on about how much more workers at the American automakers were making relative to the ones at US facilities of foreign makers.

I pointed out that it was an apples - oranges comparison, because the "liberal media" was inflating the wages of the domestic company workers with their non-wage benefits.

He told me I was wrong to be making stuff like that up.

This is why rethugs can't learn anything.

It's a hard-sell if college grads are graduating with $30K of debt, into an economy that wants to start them out with $25K jobs. It makes the whole bootstrap argument moot.

If a college degree only gets you a job paying less than a bus driver, why bother with college?..Instead of fixing the underlying problem, the obvious solution is to demonize lowly bus drivers for daring to make $50k a year:evilgrin:

:kick:

Without them, society would collapse. A bus driver deserves much more than $50K, IMHO.

$100K.

If a union member is making $100K, it's not because they're greedy. It's because the employer agreed that $100K is what that job is worth in pay and benefits. That's what collective bargaining is. And a lot of the compensation these days -- esp. in gov't unions -- is in health-care benefits that were bargained TO THE UNIONS BY THE EMPLOYERS in lieu of pay raises.

I'm trying to explain this to some anti-union blue collar friends. I'll try using your phrasing and maybe they'll stop railing against their own right to collective bargaining.

Great post.

MDN

............fortunate enough to be able to retire on a modest Teamster pension although I have to pay for my own health insurance with NO prescription coverage and costing 8K/yr. I retired in 2001 and never made over 44K/yr. These rich motherfuckers can't stand it that a "lowly working person" should have a right to make over 20K. We NEED unions just to get a living wage and benefits so we can support our families with SOME dignity.

my sister inlaw is a hard working waitress at a golf course , she makes good money dancing around the restarant with a tray i'm not sure i could hold over my shoulder , trying to please half drunk rich fooks so they will pry a tip out of there fat walets , and for all these yr of doing it her rewards are a bad back , dropped blatter she just had to have tied back up , these same fookers who are useing this for a political platform would'nt last 1 hr doing this work

Not one of them could wire a 3 way switch either.

As a teacher, I wouldn't take a school bus driver's job for 10 times my pay, and they make far less than half of my pay if it were broken down by hour. I teach the kids they are driving and know that to keep all the potential ruckus to a low roar is tough for a teacher, to have to do that and take the kids life in their hands is just something else, on rural narrow, hilly roads that get lots of snow and ice in the winter, lots of deer all year, and irate drivers is something I don't think I could do. The compensation is very small...

Just one parallel to consider...

...if we could do away with the idea of status, and realize that 98% of us are workers, who should be fighting the owners of 90% of the world's wealth, we'd start getting someplace.

classroom.

You couldn't pay me enough to drive a school bus -- even if the pay was up there in the CEO of large corporations levels.

My husband occasionally thinks of using his passengers endorsed chauffeur's license to apply as a school bus driver. My response is usually, "Have you lost your freakin' mind!!!! The pay is considerably less, the stress level is beyond belief, traffic in our area is a killer, the hours are miserable (on the way to work at 5 am) and (some of) the kids will do whatever they can to make the job harder. And the abuse from some parents isn't worth the $7 to $12 an hours that is the normal pay let alone all the rest of it. And, on top of all that, it is considered a part-time job.

Bus drivers are looked down upon, garbage workers, janitors too, farm workers...Think about where we'd be without them?? Their jobs are so valuable, and so undercompensated...they should all make more than any stock broker...

I was pointing out the difficulties that school bus drivers face and the criminally low wages they command. These men and women have the lives of our children in their hands five days a week for very low pay.

My hat is off to them. Driving a school bus can't be easy. My DH has a conversion van that I avoid driving as much as humanly possible because it is so doggoned BIG. A school bus is three times the size of his van. I've seen those bus drivers park their busses within eight inches of each other when they driving for a school field trip.

They are very skilled and deserve more compensation as do all the other service workers who make our lives cleaner, safer, and more comfortable.

Solidarity! :) and thanks!

or thereabout are the ones who say that the Wall Street pirates need their multi-million dollar bonuses so that "they'll be motivated to work hard."

If people were really rewarded for how hard they worked, our salary structure would immediately be flipped upside down.

I do not want my car fixed by someone making minimum wage. I have earned the minimum wage and worked with large numbers of people making the same. In general, with exceptions of course, the extent that they cared for the qualify of their product or were dedicated to their job was not very high. Most were pretty much constantly looking for a better paying job. You do in fact, at some level, get what you pay for, and minimum wage does not get you very much.

but have almost no career advancement. Most seem to be making about $30/hour. We've been told by our male CEO that "we make too much money".

I have a graduate degree. I work in IT for a University. If I was in the private sector I would be making twice what I make. So if someone driving a bus makes $50 grand a year, he is doing better than I am , while I am building the future.

So guess what. I apparently fall into the "bad guy" category on this.

A guy driving a bus doesn't deserve to make what a Windows deployment expert makes.

Sorry. I work longer. I work harder. I have way more experience. I have a significantly better skill set. So sorry. If a bus driver makes more that I do, it is a fucking travesty. If becoming a bus driver was a real option for advancement then I'd jump on it.

But realistically, I can do better for more people doing what I do.

So spare me the indignation.

If anything, both of you should be paid more than you are. Why play into the hands of those who'd love to drive down *everyone's* wages, save for the wealthy elite?

• "if someone driving a bus makes $50 grand a year, he is doing better than I am, while I am building the future" -- both you and the bus driver are building the future. You're facilitating learning, while the bus driver is facilitating commerce. Both activities are crucial and vital.

• "I work longer. I work harder. I have way more experience. I have a significantly better skill set." -- Factually, these are almost certainly untrue. Bus driving shifts are typically long and variable, and the work is stressful, requires exquisite moment-to-moment judgment and physical reaction time, and substantial experience. Your skill set isn't necessarily "better." The difference is that your skill set is primarily intellectual while the bus driver's is physical. "Better" is not an appropriate criterion for comparison.

• Is your job better because it offers better advancement opportunities? I'd say yes. But it doesn't follow that it should necessarily pay better.

Based on your comments and the magical-mythical 50K figure being bandied about here, I'm guessing I make about five times what you do. And what does my job result in? The employees of my company are better informed about what the company is doing, and hence probably make the company more money. Yes, my skill is intellectual, and my decisions affect not only the company but the team of people who report to me and the ones that report to them, etc.

But I still take the bus to work and rely absolutely on the competence and professionalism of the IT guys at work. I'd never say that either one of you doesn't "deserve" to make a wage that lets you live with dignity and a reasonable portion of joy.

Realistically dude bus drivers are far more valuable.

It's that you make too little. Really, $50,000 a year isn't rich nowadays.

The bus driver is probably unionized.

The rugged individualists, the high percentage of libertarians in the IT crowd, the "oh-I'm-so-brilliant and innovative" crowd, each think they can go their own way.

What if the IT workers in your department were to unionize?

It's unseemly for university workers to unionize?

Tell that to the graduate students at Yale. For years, they a $300 a semester "honorarium," which was ridiculous even in the 1960s, whether they taught one course or three.

One year, they got together and decided to withhold grades until they received pay proportionate to their work. With the parents of all the little Muffies and Throckmortons breathing down their neck, the administration agreed to pay TAs proportionate to the number of courses they were teaching and to negotiate a salary scale for the following year.

Right now, free-lance translators have formed an international organization called "No Peanuts" to fight the effort to drive down pay in the industry.

Solidarity. It's the only weapon that The Rest of Us have.

Since when did that require a college degree? I've been installing Windows on computers I built from scratch since I was about 14, and I started with Windows 3.1. Oddly enough, its gotten simpler over time.

Nowadays, I can deploy it to a lot of computers at once, rather than one, but the concept is the same, and frankly its not rocket science.

I had no idea how intellectual I was either...I can also install windows on a computer and have been deploying it to many of them also!

You work harder? You mean you might have to use the skills you've learned on the job and concepts you studied in school, you'll have to figure things out in your head but you can do it from a comfy chair in a quiet office setting with air conditioner in the summer and decent heating in the winter. You can go to the bathroom when you need to, if you are sick you can probably head off the bathroom and collect yourself, if you need some air you can probably get that too, you get to have a 'social job' setting where you actually get to know your coworkers and can make friends with them, get their help and socialize. You might only deal with people who are working in your department/university and none of the outsiders who answer to no one and can speak to you like you are their little kid who broke a glass of milk on the clean floor. You probably don't have to eat s*$T and smile or risk losing your job.

Your better skill set means you can easily leave your job at University and get a private sector job and make lots more money and probably much more easily pickup benefit wise than a bus driver, many more doors are open to you.

You went to school to get an education, not everyone has or had that opportunity for a number of reasons so spare me your sense of superiority about how you do more for people and how overall you are better than another human being because of what you do.

:rofl:
You know what? That bus driver may be impressed with this "title", but you and I and everybody that understands IT knows what you really do, and it ain't all that. "while I am building the future", really? C'mon now, do you really believe that being a M$ tool monkey is superior to an essential infrastructure worker? I'll bet you think yourself superior to the garbage collector and the street sweeper as well.
:rofl:

And I'll bet you serious cash that you are one of those self-important nit wits that refused to unionize because you used to make 'good money' and your company would always take care of you.

Oh and BTW, since Clinton & Co. decided that you didn't 'deserve' to make all that money 13 years ago (is this sounding at all familiar?), if you were in the private sector you would be constantly laid off and starting over at the bottom of the scale, while today you would most likely be collecting your last unemployment checks.

Oh the irony...
:eyes:

Call me a youngling if you want, it's relatively true.

.... Can you explain what you are talking about with regard to Clinton's administration somehow deciding that either university employees or technology workers didn't deserve to make money, and what bearing that decision has on current private sector technology work? I'm *really* confused here, but then again in 1997 I was 17. The only thing I can figure is somehow you're saying that Clinton was responsible for the .com boom/bust?

But one thing that I do think I understand out of your post is that you don't think what he does is all that important. Simply deploying Windows over large-scale environments might not be seen by many as "building the future" -- but teaching people how to do that among other things and/or supporting IT operations in a university so that *all* students have the resources they need to get the most out of their education would certainly seem like it would be helping to build the future.

Honestly, it seems like you're saying something akin to telling an English teacher "Do you believe that being able to read makes you superior to an essential infrastructure worker?". He's saying he could make more money pushing his skills in the private sector, but he chooses to teach other people how to do those things because he thinks it'll make more of a difference -- just like an English teacher could likely make more money as a proofreader or technical writer than as a teacher but knows that teaching kids to read will make more of a difference.

In 1990 the H-1(b) visa was created to ease the importation of highly skilled workers (primarily scientists and engineers) into the country to temporarily fill positions that couldn't be filled by existing American workers.

Coincidentally or not, this transpired just as the digital revolution was starting to ramp up and demand for people that understood and could work these new "magic boxes" that were finding their way into nearly every business and household in America was on the rise. The Clinton economy flourished as this new paradigm took root and pervaded commerce. It was, in a very literal sense, the new economy that was to replace the manufacturing economy that was murdered in the 80's.

The only problem was that, with essentially full employment in the field, employers began offering more money and benefits to attract these workers to their businesses, and we all know how much employers enjoy having to listen and acquiesce to the demands of their employees. Now, there was in fact a short-term shortage of well qualified employees to fill this need, but the four wall PR campaign was on and colleges across the nation were cranking out computer science majors at a prodigious rate. Regardless of this, another misinformation campaign was begun by the owners of the businesses that were profiting most in this new economy.

It was the Clinton administration that bowed to this campaign of lies and opened the floodgates. Remember the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" (it was one of his ubiquitous catch phrases)? Well, it turned out he was talking about a rising tide of virtual slaves lifting all yachts as his administration raised the quotas from the initial 65,000 to 115,000 per year. Not surprisingly this, in combination with his refusal to enforce the Sherman Act (anti-trust) and establishment of those now infamous tax breaks for off-shoring and outsourcing, resulted in the devastation of the field. In just two years tens of thousands of workers became unemployable and wages collapsed.

The dot.com balloon was a different animal altogether. That was simply the result of greed run rampant as Wall Street threw all sanity out the window, and the collapse was both well predicted and inevitable.

Regarding the "windows deployment expert" title he espouses, I was is just exposing the illusion he wants to create that what he does is in any way special. Anybody with a pulse and two brain cells in direct communication can do that with a couple months training. This the resulting aftermath of replacing actual developers (professionals) with what are variously referred to as 'tool monkeys' and 'script kiddies' (think of equating a 'guitar hero' player to a real musician).

In the end, reality is that there are very few "unskilled" jobs and the idea that one person is better than another simply because of what they do for a living is both obscene and the root of the divisions that allow us to be pitted against each other while the parasites continue to bleed us to death.

Techs and developers are definitely two different beasties. I know, I'm a tech. Sometimes I still wonder how I got into this field since I had been planning to be a psychologist... but when I realized my computer skills were marketable, I found a job that suited them. I didn't even bother with going to a votech, getting certifications, etc. Why didn't I bother attempting to get more of an education to try to work with computers? Because the writing was on the wall even at that point when my high school sweetheart went to college for computer science -- he realized that the only thing you could really do with a graduate degree in computer science was teach. Like the guy who started this subthread is doing.

So yeah, I'm pretty much a poster child for on-the-job training. My fancy title? "Mission Critical Account Support Technician". What do I do? I provide hardware and software support for the thousands of servers my company sold to a large retailer. I don't profess to know a single programming language beyond DOS batch files and simple Unix shell scripts, and I don't call that programming. As a tech I sometimes get extremely frustrated with our developers, because I'm the one who ends up finding the bugs in their code and figuring out a workaround so that the customer isn't impacted.

One thing I do have to beg to differ with, however, is that all it takes to be a good technician are two brain cells and on the job training. There is another quality -- I sometimes call it "using the Force". It's the ability to troubleshoot, to figure out why a process is not working the way it is supposed to and the way the documentation says, and to find a resolution to that problem. The ability to get put in front of a machine you've never worked on before or get asked to fix software you've never seen before, and do it. To use what you know generally to a specific problem that you've never encountered before. It's not a skill that can be taught. Either you have it, or you don't. And it's that quality that differentiates a tech who constantly has to escalate issues because they haven't encountered them before from the tech that will fix the issue and write the documentation on how to do it.

I so wish that skill could be taught. I really, really do.

Also, as I hope you saw from my other posts in this thread, I agree with your last paragraph entirely.

... I am a software developer, I run with the big dogs and I don't have a minute of computer science education.

If there was ever a field where you can "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps", IT and software dev is it.


While I'm here there is one thing I'd like to say. 50K is not 50K. 50K in Enid Oklahoma is not 50K in San Francisco.

When people are making all of these comparisons without taking local cost of living into account, well they are wasting their time.

Dispose of your own household waste, fix the roads, go out and pick your own food, slaughter your own meat....

One person's time is worth no more and no less than any other person's. Our time on Earth is equally valuable to every individual, it is all we got.

"From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need."

Oh, Christ-- do you actually expect anyone to believe that bullshit? Seriously-- you went into IT to benefit humanity...?

You went into IT because that's where the cash was at one time. Now the field has been thoroughly raped by the free trade community. If the private sector is so appealing in comparison, why aren't you there?

Look, I sympathize. I have a lot of friends in IT. But lots not pretend that it's something people go into to serve their fellow man, and let's not confuse fairness with fat cats fucking everyone over equally.

>A guy driving a bus doesn't deserve to make what a Windows deployment expert makes.<

Are you spit on, assaulted, or killed on the job by people riding your bus? No? How about driving a bus in an unsafe area of a large city in the wee hours of the morning?

It's a good thing someone takes that lowly bus driver job. After all, he's driving your ass to the office so you can save the world. In the meantime, if you work at the Evil Empire, I'm wondering if you've made your feelings about bus drivers and their salaries known to those who drive the Microsoft Connector shuttle buses on a daily basis.

Microsoft thinks bus drivers are important. Why don't you?

He works at a UNIVERSITY.

Is the college system the fscking Evil Empire? I thought that was Wal-Mart.

Edit to add: he doesn't even live in Washington, he lives in Missouri, if you had bothered to even look at the guys posts before tearing him a new asshole.

he may be interested in how Microsoft views bus drivers.

Then again, I get the general impression I'm wasting my breath.

Have a nice day!

... that he had to be working for Microsoft or some other Evil Empire like Wal-Mart. And if he was, he *would* be making more than that bus driver. Instead he's teaching other people how to be Windows deployment experts, and making less.

While I think he said what he did in a very piss-poor fashion, I thought what he was bitching about was that the people who teach the next generation how to do those skills are as underpaid as they are.

And before you think you're wasting your breath on me at least, check out my response to him. :)

you have said more than once he is teaching people, I highly doubt he is a university professor with a graduate degree making less than 50k. We don't know if the poster teaches or not, he might be, he might be a part of the IT department there. Who knows what the job is and neither absolves the looking down on someone else because they 'just drive a bus' and therefore shouldn't make as much money.

Sorry, I'm channeling Windows 98 here. :)

I'm sure that you work harder -- carrying that large head of yours around all day must be very tiring.

A guy throwing a ball through a hoop doesn't deserve to make more than a brain surgeon, either...

Who says you work harder? You have more experience? Not at driving a bus, you don't...

The guy driving the bus works his ass off, and deals with more bullshit than you or I could imagine. The fact that he is making more than you is not his fault, it's yours.

Spare ME the indignation.

Dear friend of mine recently got his LCSW. He's now working as a case worker for Child Protective Services.

He sees kids who are going through absolute hell on a daily basis, every day there's a new case that breaks his heart, each one seeming worse than the last. Parents who beat their kids to a pulp, who leave their kids at a thrift store so they can go score some crack, and that's some of the easier things he has to deal with.

Know what he makes? Entry salary was $26k. And because the state's budget is so screwed, it takes months to get his mileage reimbursements.

Yeah, he could probably make more money if he went into private counseling, or worked at a school, or worked for a private organization that does case management work.... but he's not doing it for the money.

I think a lot of people on here who have torn you a new one on this are totally missing a very important point. You know you could make more money private sector, but you're instead trying to make a difference by contributing to the future generation's ability to get the most out of their education -- whether you're teaching them how to deploy Windows or if you're making sure they have up-to-date technology to work with.

It really does suck ass that most of the professions where people can feel like what they're doing has meaning, instead of just being a job, are some of the most underpaid.

That being said, I think that people who dig ditches should make $20+ an hour. Heavy equipment operators, carpenters, etc, tear up their bodies good while doing the job. Yeah, it might not seem like it takes a lot of skill to dig a ditch, but how long can most people keep up that work before their back is shot? My dad fell off a three-story roof when he was working construction and lived in pain until the day he died from it. They may not have skills, but they are sacrificing their health.

Compensation isn't always about how much education or skill you have, but whether the pay is worth the stress of the job. That's part of the reason I think social workers are doubly screwed -- not only are not getting paid in accordance to how much they're contributing to society, but also not in accordance to the sheer amount of stress the job entails.

My wife is a social worker. She gets paid crap, although here in Germany health care is not
an issue--a very big deal since she was out for a year with cancer, and her employer couldn't
fire her under German labor laws. Even so, she works 50% more hours than she is paid for, and
it's still a thankless job.

It took me a dozen years of education and experience after high school to get qualified for my job. If I see someone with less skill/experience/education making more, my reaction is "good on them!" If anything, it's a wake up call that those in my profession need to work harder at improving our pay and benefits.

I realize your job took more to get than that of the bus driver, but in your day to day life, are you certain you work any harder than he does? Also, if you screw up on the job, people could have computer problems. If the bus driver screws up, people can get killed. Like it or not, he does have some responsibility.

But when you do, please teach them not to think like you.

This type of "I'm better than you are, because I sit on my ass at a desk all day" sentiment, is why a significant portion of the underpaid blue collar "working class" CONTINUES to be stupid enough to vote in conservatives time and time again against their own best interests...OH and BTW, sorry, but unless you are a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company or are independently wealthy, then I don't care if you have a blue, or a white collar job -- you my friend, are still part of the working class.

Furthermore...If the lowly bus drivers and others that you deem to be mentally inferior to yourself can't make a living wage and the pay scale keeps deteriorating in this country, then you and your like minded ilk, won't "be building anyone's future" because there won't be anyone able to afford to attend universities in this country!

Spare you the indignation indeed.

Considering your job- hell, your quality of life- depends on mine (in a whole bunch of ways you probably aren't even aware of), I think you need to get down off your high horse.

Do I deserve better pay than you? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do. My job really is more important than yours is, was, or ever will be. In fact, every employer in the entire country- every last one- depends on me and mine every single day in one way or another. I'm so damn vital I'm both contractually and legally bound from going on strike. My job is so damn important that, were I and mine to stop doing our jobs, the entire US economy would crash overnight.

I'm not being hyperbolic here. I'm not exaggerating in any way. Without the USPS, business stops. Everywhere. Including yours. Oh, by the way, my job has existed from this nation's founding. Your job is most definitely not necessary to the functioning of my job. My job is absolutely vital for yours to even exist.

I don't have a degree of any kind. My skills are those of a factory worker- or a bus driver. I work in a dirty, noisy, dangerous environment where not paying attention can make you a cripple for life or even get you killed (and yes, postal workers have indeed been killed in the line of duty- not as many as police or firefighters, but it has happened). I make upward of sixty grand a year, I absolutely deserve every last penny of it, and I probably ought to be paid more than that.

So I'm going to throw your words back into your teeth. I do more for this country every working day than you ever will over the course of your entire working career. The daily value of my job, in hard dollar figures, is astronomical compared to the yearly value of yours. I make the money change hands (tens of thousands of dollars worth over an eight hour shift), I make the bills get sent in both directions, and I even send your mom her birthday card. And then some.

Without me, the country stops. Without you, the country yawns. So consider yourself verbally spanked. You definitely deserve it for that rotten pap you spewed.

driving. Traffic conditions anymore are dreadful. An error on the part of the bus driver could put the lives of 50 to 70 people's lives in serious danger.

And the people I know that do drive busses, school and public transportation, don't make anything even NEAR $50,000 per year. I don't know about Greyhound and other comparable companies, but I doubt the average drivers are making that kind of money either.

And, no, my husband does not drive a bus.

you would du,p the university in a heartbeat. but i bet you know it's a much more secure position and dont want to risk it.
work longer and harder- how would you fuvking know that? you don;t. what insufferable ego,

:shrug:

Flash suite in the middle of the summer! Some jobs have dangerous possibilities to them and thanks to the cuts in the work force I have to do OT to get the job done which takes me into the six figure range now if only I could only pay <1% tax like Goldman Sachs instead of the 20% I get hit up with!

these people want to take us back to Dickensian England. Is there any doubt?

And for driving a bus one has to have a passenger's endorsement too. Which means school and more money. Every time the person renews his/her drivers license.

And many of the "lowly" service industry jobs are very high stress jobs too. (And in white collar jobs, the secretaries (pink collar) do all the work and the boss gets all the credit and the money.

People seem to want to think that the more any person makes, the less is potentially available for them. This is only potentially true if you are a CEO and the folks being discussed work for you. This considered, there is little evidence that employee wages have had the effect of controlling CEO pay in even a modest way.

Actually, for the vast majority of us, the more our neighbors make, the better the chance we will get a raise. Wage competition for talented labor can be a bit inflationary, but it is the only time in the economic cycle that workers make real gains in compensation. Government policy under conservatives has worked every lever available to it to prevent wage competition for thirty years, thus the decline of the middle class and the vast and growing disparity of wealth.

for passengers and monitoring passenger activity, all at the same time.

He states that white collar people hate that some blue collar workers get paid well. Really? Who hates that? Let's see a list of names.

I've been in the work force almost all my life, and have been alive 56 years. I've had many political discussions, as well as discussions about welfare, unemployment, etc., etc. I have NEVER run across a white collar worker who is aghast that a blue collar worker would get paid well.

This reminds me of the sort of story I see on Fox. They start out with a story..."People are complaining about the cost of the new healthcare bill!" And then they go on to discuss what's wrong with the bill. The catch is that NO ONE was complaining about that. That was just a false premise to start a story where all they did was criticize something that was Democratic.

There are lots of things wrong with this discussion. No one has stopped to unpack the assumptions that are built in.
Why is the assumption being made that white collar workers despise blue collar workers? Many, if not most, of the people on DU are white collar workers. Why is the assumption being made that white collar workers are doctors and lawyers making an easy 200K? That kind of thinking is erroneous. I'm a white collar professional with years of experience and I make less than a lot of blue collar workers. I don't go around complaining about how much they make; I simply want to make a little more for myself.
The implication that all white collar workers are right wingers is false. Lots of white collar workers are progressives who have paid their dues. You'll find people in white collar jobs who have gone through terrible times in their own lives. I know I have. My workplace is not unionized and the management has taken stealthy measures to undermine any effort on the part of the staff to even think about unionizing, as well as measures to spy on us and report back any talk about unionizing.
What's at the center of this discussion is a debate over the nature of intellectual work versus physical labor. I won't buy into any suggestion that white collar workers as a class have contempt for physical labor, because far too many of us are intimately familiar with it. I've worked in construction and in a factory, and I know how hard it is. On the other hand, I live in a rural area where most people don't go to college, and I see essentially no recognition of the value of intellectual labor among my neighbors, least of all at the local school. Is it forbidden for anyone to point that out ? I once lived in a rural town where any kid who went off to university after graduating from the HS was ostracized by the 95% who just went into logging. I can't support that value system either.
This post was essentially a random attack on the professional class with no basis in fact or principle. Don't kid yourself that all white collar workers are fat cats getting rich or richer -- it's not true. I wish I made as much as an electrician or a plumber. And what about people who leave professional positions? I had a doctor years ago who was absolutely great at her job and she left the medical profession completely.
Many, many doctors, lawyers, teachers, and even business owners and entrepreneurs are independents or progressives politically. Point two: lots of white collar workers are not making money hand over fist.

else making more money than they do, think they should or are told that the other person should and feel it isn't fair. The post doesn't say that all white collar workers feel that way it argues 'too many' and the fact that anyone feels that way is in fact too many, in my opinion if no one else's. Why are regular people attacking other regular people for the money they make?

Thoughts of 'The lazy union people are making so much money and I didn't get a raise last year.' Or 'they get benefits and I don't', the point is people are jealous of others and instead of thinking 'my employer is screwing me over' they think 'that's not fair, make them suffer like me.' The people in blue collar jobs making more money than white collar people are often government employees or in some union as that is really the only way they keep a living wage with a blue collar job, absent some life threatening field.

The problem is more than just white collar workers as the post makes it out to be, it is that anyone feels this way about someone else making a living, if any feeling of outrage should be felt it should for people not making enough money, not that someone makes too much based on the jobs they do, because of what 'I don't make that' or 'that work/field should pay crap', 'it is a lowly occupation', that kind of thinking doesn't so anything for us except foster feeling of dragging us all down when we are all already so low. More over who benefits from the 'little people' fighting each other is it any of the little people, do any of us win when we want to see someone else suffer like we do?

Don't raise taxes cut Public employee salaries
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jul/03/dont-raise-taxes-cut-public-employee-compensation/

Why shouldn't government employees take a pay cut?
http://www.scragged.com/articles/why-shouldnt-public-employees-take-a-pay-cut.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Scragged+(Scragged)

Where to cut? public employees salaries.
http://nevadanewsandviews.com/2010/07/09/where-to-cut-public-employee-salaries/

Rutgers freezes employee pay due to budget cuts
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/06/rutgers_to_freeze_salaries_of.html

That opening paragraph is an inflammatory chasm into which many of our usual knee-jerks jumped into.

How many people even bothered to look at the TPM article the blog was referencing about a republican Minnesota state rep Tom Emmer, who was proposing lowering minimum wage for wait staff and crediting their tips towards the state wage requirement. I've always thought this was done anyway, but the controversy came when he implied that sometimes the waiters/waitresses were making even more than the restauranteurs.

His comments were constructed poorly and he is getting flamed for it, but the blog then takes it a step further from reality by asserting unproven classist claims as if that premise were a given. Very Fox-news-like...

I'm a six figure earner and I don't begrudge ANYONE for wanting a FAIR wage. I live in Central NJ. Have friends from Philly out to Long Island, some in Doylestown and New Hope PA.

For whatever it's worth . . . 50K a year is NOT enough to live AND save for an emergency. Not in Philadelphia - not happening. If that person has a family forget about it.

By the way - white collar worker who is the proud girlfriend and love of a man who gets his hands dirty every day - either via his art (metal artist) or his welding/creation of people's fences, entry ways, fixtures, etc. etc. Grand daughter of a construction man on one side and farmer on the other.

Let's hear it for the people that actually WORK and get their hands dirty and tired feet and hurting backs . . . for a living!

fuck that.

and he just might do it.

It's that they think they make too little in comparison.

I think most everyone feels that they're underpaid -- and I've never heard a soul complain about being overpaid. Blue collar, white collar, "pink collar", whatever, most people think they should me making more money than they are. We know the stresses and duties of our own jobs better than we do anyone else's... because we work the job. I work in a highly paid profession. I'm a computer tech. I didn't go to school, I taught myself. I've got a lot of skills and experience that I feel do merit what I am being paid. I don't think I'm underpaid now, so maybe I am a rarity.

But when I was working a previous assignment, I got really upset when I heard someone made more than me. It was a project to go across the country to upgrade a business's systems from NT to XP. A four-man team would go out to each site -- a team lead and two techs worked during the night, then one worked during the day. The night job was essentially run cables from a server they brought to all of the site's workstations, type in a few commands to capture the data, then replaced HW and push the data back out. The daytime person would stay onsite all day to resolve problems for the users, teach them how to use the equipment, restore any data that didn't make it over, troubleshoot apps, etc.

I was hired on for the pilot as the daytime person, and wrote all of the documentation for the people who would be doing that job in the main rollout. I worked with the teams to figure out what was wrong with apps that wouldn't migrate properly and implement fixes so that the users weren't impacted by those problems in the main rollout. I was then responsible for hiring the ten people that would perform that function on the main rollout, as well as training them on how to do all of the things I figured out how to do insofar as making the apps work, etc. During the main rollout I not only did the daytime role for the sites that were on my route, but I was the person the other ten people called when they couldn't figure something out. I got called all day and all night. I got ass-chewings from the customer if one of the other techs messed something up. I also worked trouble tickets that were called in after the crew left.

Then one of the daytime techs -- not the lead -- told me how much they were making.... 30% more than I was. I polled a few of the people I hired and trained -- they were getting at least 30% more than me and sometimes even more than that. I was absolutely furious. It wasn't that they were making more than me, or that I begrudged them what they made... it was that I was making far less than what I deserved for all of the work I had put in. (I was also the only female on the entire project.) If the company could afford that kind of pay for people with less responsibility than I had, they could afford more for me!

Would a bus driver be working as hard as I was then, and going through as much stress as I was? Would a ditch-digger, garbage man, or construction worker be working as hard as I was? I think the answer to that question is "Yes, and possibly more so!" Just a different type of work, and a different type of stress.

There are many professions that are underpaid -- and a lot of them can be classified as blue collar work. Heavy equipment operators are not compensated enough, in my opinion, to make up for the damage that the constantly vibrating machines do to their backs, as just one example. But there are white-collar jobs that are horrendously underpaid, too.

Take social work. Sure, my friend with an LCSW who works for Child Protective Services is not sweating in the sun all day. He just works on a daily basis seeing horrific cases of child abuse and neglect that tear his heart apart... and it doesn't get any easier. My mom was a social worker too, at one point administering the Medicaid Waiver program for children with developmental disabilities. There was only a certain amount of funds available, and far too many kids who needed help. She would bring her work home with her literally -- I saw her crying over case files because she knew the kids needed help but the funds just weren't available. What does my LCSW friend make? Entry was $26,000. What did Mom make? $17,000.

There's nothing wrong with bus drivers making $50k. But there IS something wrong with social workers making half that.

He's a skilled worker, but we still occasionally hear condescending comments from family members with master's degrees who make less. Believe me, none of them would want to do the work he does or work the hours he does. He works very hard, worked his way up the ladder and while he may not have a master's degree, he has extensive training and certifications.

I really do think that some people are bitter that a lowly blue collar worker could dare to make a good living.

It does not matter how much THEY have..they do not want others to have ANYTHING!!!

I have heard similar complaints about teachers being so "overpaid".
So how come if it is such a great profession all those whiners and moaners are not out there teaching??

Speaking of which, I am worth $1 million thats what I know I'm worth.

Thats all I'm sayin'